The widespread growth of communication networks and internet enabled consumer devices allow consumers to stream on-demand videos and music. The on-demand video and music service is typically provided by large companies or second party distributors that store the media content for streaming to the consumer devices. For example, a television company may maintain a television server that stores all television shows that are broadcast by the television company such that the consumer may stream the stored television show on the consumer device. This requires the television company to store all or substantially all the shows broadcast by the television company, which requires a great deal of data storage and often comes at a significant cost to the television company. The cost of storing all the broadcast shows is typically passed on to the consumer using the on-demand service such that the consumer ends up paying for storage of videos and music that the consumer has no interest in streaming.
In particular, the consumer may be charged a flat rate monthly subscription fee by the television company. For example, the consumer may be charged a ten dollar fee per month for streaming videos from the television server. The flat rate subscription fee may not change irrespective of whether the consumer streams hundreds of videos a month or one video a month. Consumers that vary the amount of content that is streamed monthly may end up paying more money for the service than if they simply bought the video content on digital versatile disk (DVD).
Some television companies and second party video and music distributors offer a flat rate per video or show that is streamed. In particular, a consumer may be charged a set fee for streaming a specific episode of a television program. For example, the consumer may be charged five dollars for streaming a two hour long episode of a television show to their consumer device. However, another consumer will be charged the same five dollar flat rate for streaming a fifteen minute episode of another television show. The flat rate fee associated with a specific video or show that a consumer wants to stream may end up detracting consumers who do not always stream long running episodes of television shows.
Moreover, consumers may want to stream videos of a particular program that may not be currently stored in the television server. The consumer may request the program in order for the television server to be updated to store the particular program but such a request may take weeks to months to fulfill. As such, the consumer may end up losing interest in the particular program, and the television server may eventually end up being updated with a particular video that no consumers stream, thereby unnecessarily expending data resources and driving up the cost of the streaming service.
There is a need in the art for an on-demand media storage and streaming system that tailors cost to each consumer based on the requested media content and each consumer's needs.